Large Scale Software Upgrades

Software upgrades are inevitable. In attempting this type of overhaul, it’s important to document the challenges and create a solid plan to ensure that you achieve your upgrade performance improvement objectives.

Y&L Consulting recently helped the Argo Group with their SharePoint migration and performance optimization.

Challenge:

Argo used SharePoint as a file storage and collaboration platform across various geographies. The employees in the UK used SharePoint for storing particularly large files (in excess of 25 MB), and were experiencing very slow response times.

They also used SharePoint for status monitoring, workflows, forms, etc., and wanted to take advantage of the newest version of SharePoint offered.

Y&L Consulting’s Solution:

Y&L Consulting performed a thorough digital analysis of the administrative and backend reports from the network and SharePoint system and determined that the problems included: packet loss, latency issues due to geographical distance, and demand that had far outgrown the capacity of the setup.

We set up a traditional, local (to UK), three-tier SharePoint Server farm on three servers, with roles distributed among them.

The following diagram represents a simplified architecture of the SharePoint Farm:

DB Clustering was done to provide scalability and business continuity. Y&L also set up full and incremental backup, optimized crawling, etc.

The following table shows the performance improvement that Argo experienced from the upgrade:

For the SharePoint migration portion of the project, Y&L analyzed the master page and the 36 team sites in scope, documented the various customizations, requested changes, customized web parts, and also identified downstream applications that would be impacted by the change.

Detailed planning and implementation followed the tests. After which, the upgrade was rolled out to users across the UK.

The performance tuning and migration was lauded by senior management and general users alike.

Y&L Consulting continued on to provide maintenance and support for the project over the next quarter, building enhancements into the system.